In the Picture

A new biography of Diane Arbus.

Arbus at the “New Documents” show at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1967.

Photograph by Dan Budnik

In 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to buy three photographs by Diane Arbus, for seventy-five dollars each. Wiser counsels prevailed, however, and a few months later the museum decided to take only two. Why splurge? The Museum of Modern Art was more daring; in 1964, it had acquired seven Arbus photos, including “Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C.” Not until the aftermath of Arbus’s death, however, in 1971, and the retrospective of her work at moma the following year, did public fascination start to seethe, swelling far beyond the bounds of her profession. The swell has never slowed, and prices have followed suit. At Christie’s, in 2007, “Child with a toy hand grenade” sold for two hundred and twenty-nine thousand dollars. Last year, another print of it, this one signed by the artist, fetched seven hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars. That’s quite a hike.

Who is this kid, and what is he doing with a weapon, even a fake one, in Central Park? Well, his name is Colin Wood, and Arbus met him there in early 1962, when he was seven. We have a contact sheet of the pictures that she took that day. (It is reprinted in “Revelations,” a hefty and absorbing volume published in 2003 to accompany an Arbus retrospective.) Colin is dressed in shorts and suspenders which lend him a Teutonic air, and he is happy to strike a pose. There are eleven images, and in six of them he stands with hands on hips. Most of the time, he looks jaunty and self-possessed, and you can count the missing teeth in his grin. So why did Arbus pick the shot in which he tightens his mouth into a stretched-out grimace, cupping one hand into an upturned claw while the other grips a grenade? Isn’t he just making sport, or doing an impersonation of someone—an actor in a monster movie, say—consumed by sudden dread? Might Arbus, in short, be guilty of rigging the evidence to fit a mood, making fear out of fun?

That was what I had always suspected, until I read “Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer,” by Arthur Lubow (Ecco). One coup, in this new biography, is an interview with Colin Wood, conducted by Lubow in 2012. We learn that Wood was a Park Avenue kid, stranded at the time with nannies while his parents were busy divorcing, and “living primarily on powdered Junket straight from the box.” He brought his toy guns to school. Wood says of Arbus, “She saw in me the frustration, the anger at my surroundings, the kid wanting to explode but can’t because he’s constrained by his background.” If she did see all that, it was by instinct, with a touch of fellow-feeling; she had started out much like Colin, and continued that way. Now she found a boy preparing to pull the pin, and snapped. “Giving a camera to Diane,” Norman Mailer said, after sitting for her, “is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.”

Arbus was born into wealth, and you could, if inclined, construe the life that followed as one long struggle to get away from wealth—to crawl free of it, like someone seeking the exit from a treasure-stacked cave. “The outside world was so far from us,” Arbus said. She was a Russek, which to anyone who suddenly needed a mink stole, in the depths of the Great Depression, was a name to reach for. Russeks, founded by her maternal grandfather, was originally a furrier’s; by 1924, it was a department store on Fifth Avenue, selling not only furs but also gowns, coats, and, as an advertisement put it that year, “smart accessories for the correctly dressed woman.” In 1919, Diane’s mother, Gertrude, married a young window dresser at the store named David Nemerov. Their son, Howard, who grew up to become poet laureate, was born twenty-one weeks after the wedding. Diane was born in 1923, and her sister, Renee, in 1928.

No woman was more correctly dressed than Gertrude. She sailed to Paris with her husband whenever he went to survey the new couture collections. Her pleasure was to be chauffeured to Russeks and to parade through its rooms, past bowing and smiling staff, accompanied by her older daughter, who, in white gloves and patent-leather slippers, saw herself as “a princess in some loathsome movie.” One thing Arbus claimed to have suffered from, as a child, was that “I never felt adversity.”

There are two responses to this. One is: Give me some of that suffering. If you had asked any of the Dust Bowl farmers photographed in their thin clothes by Dorothea Lange whether they would mind getting dressed up, after a fancy breakfast, and going to a workplace where everyone was nice to them, they would have said that, all things considered, they could handle it. Was there, in Arbus, a lingering whiff of the poor little rich girl? To say that she slummed would be unfair, but she revelled in settings that money couldn’t touch, or in surfaces where it had left its scratch marks: Brenda Frazier, pictured in 1966, twenty-eight years after she had been crowned “débutante of the year,” appears to be held together by powder, paint, and pearls.

Regular politics, and the calls of social responsibility, certainly meant little to Arbus. She stepped aside from the notion that a photograph might, in addition to its aesthetic shape and shock, harbor some documentary worth, especially in an era of deprivation or unrest. Not many Jews would go, willingly and uncritically, to listen to Nazis in Yorkville. If she was a pilgrim on the fringes of society, it was fascination rather than compassion that drove her there, and many of the outcasts she discovered, far from being ground down, had elected to cast themselves out. The balding and shirtless figure who glares at us in “Tattooed man at a carnival, Md.” (1970) requests not an atom of our pity. Indeed, he puts our undistinguished bodies to scorn, brandishing the art work of his torso as though to holler, “Get a load of me.”

On the other hand, we may choose to take Arbus at her word. If all that privilege brought her a world of pain, so be it. And it’s hard to think of a more frangible instance of motherhood than Gertrude, who, according to Lubow, “typically stayed in bed in the morning past eleven o’clock, smoking cigarettes, talking on the telephone, and applying cold cream and cosmetics to her face.” At one point, she fell into a ravine of depression and got stuck, sitting wordlessly at the family dinner table. “I stopped functioning. I was like a zombie,” she recalled later. Her husband, meanwhile, presented an alternative—and no less daunting—role model. Though Gertrude’s parents had believed that she was marrying down, David, smooth and frictionless, rose through the ranks of Russeks as if stepping into the elevator. By 1947, he had arrived at the position of president.

Arbus inherited both strains: the urge to follow your star, plus the rage to cut yourself off and plunge into personal lockdown. One further twist in her upbringing was that she did not endure it alone, for her brother, Howard, was close to her, although whether that closeness offered aggravation or relief is open to debate. Both were precocious students, and they shared other talents, too. Diane masturbated in the bathroom with the blinds up, to insure that people across the street could watch her, and as an adult she sat next to the patrons of porno cinemas, in the dark, and gave them a helping hand. (This charitable deed was observed by a friend, Buck Henry, the screenwriter of “The Graduate.”) Not to be outdone in these vigorous stakes was her brother, who later, in a book called “Journal of the Fictive Life,” defined his self-abuse as “worship.” He added, “My father once caught me at it, and said he would kill me if it ever happened again.” A friend of Gertrude’s once told Howard that reading Freud would make you sick. On the contrary, it would be like a day in the life of the Nemerovs.

The summit of this weirdness comes before Lubow has reached page twenty, with the disclosure, from Arbus, that “the sexual relationship with Howard that began in adolescence had never ended. She said that she last went to bed with him when he visited New York in July 1971. That was only a couple of weeks before her death.” The source for this is a psychiatrist named Helen Boigon, who treated Arbus in the last two years of her life, and who was interviewed—though not named—by Patricia Bosworth for her 1984 biography of Arbus. (The results are in an archive at Boston University.) William Todd Schultz, too, communicated with Boigon for “An Emergency in Slow Motion” (2011), his unblushing psychological portrait of Arbus. He, like Bosworth, is more circumspect than Lubow, proposing that “something did happen between the two siblings” but “what exactly, and with what results, is impossible to say.”

Are we dealing with verifiable facts here, or with a yarn entwined with myth and spun by a woman in distress? Either way, what stands out is the tone of Arbus’s telling. The intimate rapport of brother and sister was apparently recounted to the psychiatrist in a casual manner, as though incest were no big deal—just a family habit that you kept up, like charades. And that otherworldly coolness drifts into Arbus’s art. What her admirers respond to is not so much the gallery of grotesques as her reluctance to be wowed or cowed by them, still less to censure them or to set them up for mockery. She makes Fellini, a more urbane soul, look a little hot in the blood. Freaks may abound in her art, but not once do they freak her out.

When Diane Nemerov was thirteen, she fell in love with Allan Arbus, who worked in the advertising department at Russeks and described himself as “Mister Nobody.” The romance bore a startling resemblance to that of her parents. Diane and Allan married in 1941, once she had turned eighteen; in 1944, just after he was shipped off to India on war service as a photographer, she found that she was pregnant, and their daughter, Doon, was born the next year. Allan had given his wife a camera after their honeymoon, and she had taken a course with the photographer Berenice Abbott, at the New School. When the war ended, Allan and Diane, with the encouragement (and the financial assistance) of David Nemerov, went into business together. Their apartment was on West Seventieth Street, and their studio on West Fifty-fourth. They shot fashion spreads for Glamour, which hailed them as a professional couple in a piece called “Mr. and Mrs. Inc.” With the article went a self-portrait: their heads are touching, but they look at different things. His eyes, dark and wide, stare straight ahead; hers are lowered, with the modesty of a Madonna. The thumb on the shutter release is his.

How and when did Arbus, as it were, turn into Arbus? What spurred her to forge images—identical twins in identical dresses, in New Jersey, or “Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y.,” looming over his loved ones—that we realize, instantly and indisputably, could have been made by nobody else? Such is the conundrum that greets her biographers, and Lubow begins his book with a dramatic solution: an occasion, in the middle of the nineteen-fifties, when Diane announced, at the butt end of a day in which she and Allan had toiled on a shoot for Vogue, that she was done with fashion photography. From now on, she would set her own course. In a letter from 1957, she wrote, “I am full of a sense of promise, like I often have, the feeling of always being at the beginning.”

Her first move was to study with Lisette Model, who steered her away from the hazy (“I used to make very grainy things,” Arbus recalled) and toward a clarity that would specify rather than blur—confronting us with this person, in this place, wearing this outfit, or no outfit at all. Other developments ensued: in August, 1959, Arbus moved out, taking with her the couple’s daughters, Doon and Amy (born in 1954). They found a house on Charles Street, in the West Village, while Allan decamped to Washington Place; she regularly went there to use his darkroom, and he came over for Sunday breakfasts. In keeping with the rules of concealment by which she had been raised, Arbus didn’t tell her parents about the split. It took them three years to find out.

Set against that is an air of artistic haste and a quickening appetite—of the photographer’s eye beginning to gorge on the world around her, and on its panoply of goods. Arbus was a chronic lister, and you get swept up and along by the host of things that she hoped to seize on film, as noted in her appointment book: “diaper derby palisades, walkathon st. louis, chess champ, miss appetite, miss fluidless contact lens, yeast raised donut queen.” In 1963, she applied, successfully, for a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation*. “I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present,” she wrote. “I want to gather them, like somebody’s grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.” Never was the future perfect put to better use.

The document delves into detail: “the Testimonial Dinner, the Seance, the Gymnasium and the Picnic,” and so on. This is the most appealing side of Arbus: you feel a gust of Whitman, or of her near-contemporary Allen Ginsberg, in her sallying forth to compile such tumultuous chronicles of America. She was a wonderful writer, and we deserve an anthology of her prose; no one else but her would report, of a trip to Florida, “There is kind of a bad smell here like God cooking chicken soup in the sky. And the language is full of money.” All the while, though, this frail adventurer could be pulled inward and downward, into a whirlpool of old woes. It was as if “Leaves of Grass,” in need of an update, had been handed to Sylvia Plath.

The early nineteen-sixties saw a change of tools. Having worked principally in 35mm., Arbus turned to a Rolleiflex: a twin-lens reflex, with one lens placed above the other. You hold it, hang it around your neck, or fix it on a tripod, at waist level, then peer down into the viewfinder. The image you perceive there is reversed, with left becoming right, but there are compensations. One, if you like to take pictures of your fellow-beings, as Arbus did, and to nourish an unbroken rapport with them, the Rolleiflex is ideal; in contrast to most cameras, then as now, you don’t raise it to your eye and block your face. Two, there is increased sharpness, because of the area of film—or, in Arbus’s words, “whatever the heck that stuff on film is”—that gets exposed on the negative. And three, that area is two and a quarter inches square: a blessed change from the landscape format that governs our visual experience, starting with the majority of paintings, proceeding to movie and TV screens, and ending, these days, with laptops. Arbus moved in some pretty far-out circles, but she knew the value of squares.

When we think of an Arbus photograph, it will probably have been taken with a Rolleiflex, or else with a Mamiya C33, to which she upgraded in the mid-sixties, and which also adopts the square format. This meant a lot of baggage. Arbus was as slight as a pixie, but one acquaintance recalled her lugging around “two Mamiya cameras, two flashes, sometimes a Rollei, a tripod, all sorts of lenses, light meters, film.” The flash was often used to stark effect; detractors of Arbus, who find her cruel, might plausibly point to her photographs of babies—most of them howling or drooling and utterly bare of joy. Their faces get in your face. Young or old, people tend to dominate the frame, with no idle space next to them. Even when they get shunted off to the edges, as in her 1963 shot of a retired couple—the man seated on the left, his wife on the right—the center doesn’t go to waste, for there, like an altar, stands a television, topped with a lamp, two photographs, and a clock. These pleasant folk, apart from their Biblical nakedness (for we are in a nudist camp), could be welcoming us into any well-kept American home.

If I could afford to buy an Arbus, I would pick a landscape, or a roomscape—one of those unpeopled places where our fellow-citizens have been, and will come again. Her 1962 photograph of a castle in Disneyland, after hours, makes you tremble for any prince who goes in search of Sleeping Beauty; who knows what fevered brand of dreams might come true? And her shot of a Christmas tree, dripping with tinsel, next to a lamp whose shade is still wrapped in cellophane, is an ill omen for the festive season—not cynical, I think, but humming with a furtive trepidation. Such is the sign of Arbus: all her vacancies are full.

The singularity of Arbus came to the fore in 1967, at the Museum of Modern Art, in a show entitled “New Documents.” Three photographers were represented: Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and, in a room of her own, Arbus, who was greeted with yellow roses, by Richard Avedon, as she arrived on opening night. According to one friend, “The press was all about Diane, it was as if Garry and Lee didn’t exist.” That sounds partial, but it’s easy to imagine a visitor wandering into the Arbus space and being struck by the brunt of the impact. Winogrand and Friedlander were, in their different ways, trapping life on the hop—sometimes on the slant, too, in Winogrand’s case. If the American throng approached him down the avenue at full tilt, well, he would tilt right back: anything not to miss a trick. Friedlander paid his own homage to such multiplicity, doubling his subjects in windows, wing mirrors, and storefront glass. With Arbus, though, the hopping had to stop. The men of “New Documents” dealt in the glimpse and the glance; the woman chose to stare, and she specialized in tracking down those who would plant themselves, on center stage, and return the look with interest—midgets, musclemen, twins, transvestites, hermaphrodites, bathers, strippers, and a woman with a monkey, swaddled like an infant, on her lap.

When it came to nudists, Arbus went unclothed. Her job was to join them, not beat them. We presume that artists, whatever their medium, take care to keep their distance, and Arbus was scrupulous about the legality of her ventures, obtaining permission from her subjects to photograph them and to reproduce the results. Time and again, though, she crossed into their territory—as a guest, a pal, a playmate, or an invader, according to your point of view. “How does she do it?” Irving Penn reportedly asked. “She puts a camera between those bare breasts and photographs those nudists.” That was nothing. She once said that she had sex with any man who asked for it, and described a pool party at which she worked through the various men, one after the next, as if they were canapés. The courteous Lubow calls her “multivalent.”

What’s remarkable is that such liberty extended to her pictures. An orgy counted as work and leisure alike. Look at a contact sheet of young lovers, a black man and a white woman, from 1966, and you notice that the naked figure sprawled across him, in frame five, is Arbus. Even Eddie Carmel, the Jewish giant, said that she “came on” to him, and he was at least eight feet nine. At the other end of the scale was Lauro Morales, the Mexican dwarf, whom Arbus photographed over many years; in one bedroom shot, from 1970, he radiates what Lubow calls “a look of postcoital languor.” All creatures great and small: nothing was foreign to Arbus, as she roamed the human zoo.

The Morales portrait is a case in point. He is naked except for a tilted hat on his head and a towel across his lap. His smile, beneath a dapper mustache, is collaborative and conspiratorial. As Arbus said, “A photograph is a secret about a secret.” Compare Morales to Sebastian de Morra, a dwarf at the court of Philip IV, who was painted by Velázquez around 1645. De Morra is robed, seated, and foreshortened, with his legs sticking out: a generous pose, for we can’t tell how tall he is, and that’s the point. His expression is grave, steady, and inquiring, as though we were in a police station or a principal’s office, being held to account for our activities. Both images exert a formidable grip, but De Morra is examining us. Morales has eyes only for Arbus. Freaks, as she called them, “don’t have to go through life dreading what may happen, it’s already happened. They’ve passed their test. They’re aristocrats.”

Lubow is entering a crowded arena, for the Arbus industry is hardly a place of repose. Yet the author fights for his spot, and earns it. His research is unflagging and his timing is good, for Arbus could scarcely be more fashionable, with her thrill at the fluidity of genders, and her trafficking with anonymity and fame. Bosworth may have a keener nose for detail (from her we learn that at one moma show, an assistant had to go around each morning and wipe the Arbus photographs where people had spat on them), whereas Lubow is more intent upon the shifts in Arbus’s work. He is rightly amused, too, by the clash of her professional ardor with her domestic duties, highlighting a note from her appointment book, from 1959: “Buy Amy’s birthday present, go to the morgue.”

Readers of Lubow’s biography may feel not just the heft of the thing, over seven hundred pages and twice as long as Bosworth’s, but a nagging suspicion that it dreams of being a novel: “Insistently, incessantly, the notes throbbed in doleful cadence on the clarinet.” When a mosquito lands on his subject, Lubow is right there: “Changing its strategy, the insect whined upward and then landed on the nipple of her right breast. This time, it sank its feeder deep into her flesh and drank.” Even Boswell never got that close. Then, there are Arbus’s friends, each of them allotted a lengthy character sketch, and all of them jumping onto the sexual carousel:

She didn’t realize it might be making Allan angry to think that his wife was yearning sexually for Alex, any more than she sensed that Jane might be alarmed and antagonized to learn that Allan thought Diane just wanted to go to bed with Jane’s fiancé.

I have read that sentence several times, and I still don’t get who is bunking down with whom. It might have been simpler if Lubow had drawn a Venn diagram instead. Yet even these scenes have a purpose, for they remind us of the atmosphere in which Arbus thrived, and they compel the toughest questions: Did she carry the hothouse of the Nemerovs around with her forever, and, if so, did it heighten or stunt her art? Can you be honest to a fault, and does that fault lure you not merely into wild indiscretion but right to the brink of ferocity? Was there a mote of meanness in her eye, or did it just see more than our lazy gaze can ever hope to do? Arbus photographed her own father, at his funeral, in his coffin, and confessed to being jealous of her younger sister, Renee, for having been raped as a teen-ager. Diane was said to radiate “aggressive vulnerability,” and some people were worn down by posing for her, hour upon hour, until they were frazzled and frayed; only then would she get the shot she required. In 1971, writing from London to a friend, Arbus complained that “nobody seems miserable, drunk, crippled, mad, or desperate. I finally found a few vulgar things in the suburb, but nothing sordid yet.”

If, in the end, any biography of her becomes exhausting, that is because she is exhausting. If her genius both astounds and tires, it is because, whatever the courage and the tolerance with which she sought out the eccentric, she always seems to remain at the center, while others revolve around her. Of the triplets whom she photographed in Jersey City, in 1966, she said, “They remind me of myself.” Though a friend of Walker Evans, she found his pictures “insanely unconflictive,” which tells you more about her than about him. Since her quest for conflict was a natural reflex, bred in the bone, even her most outlandish pictures come to seem like self-portraits: windows transmuted into mirrors. As her marriage to Allan failed, for instance, she was, like her mother before her, dragged into depression and sucked down, declaring, “The thing that sticks most in the throat and hurts the most is how easy it is. The joy and terror are both in the swallowing.” A decade later, outside a circus tent, she photographed an albino woman swallowing a sword.

Diane Arbus took her own life in 1971, with barbiturates and a blade. She had complained of “lacking the confidence even to cross the street,” and a final entry in her appointment book read, “Last Supper.” In those late years, however, there had been grace notes of a surprising kind: photographs of mentally disabled women, many of them in an institution in Vineland, New Jersey, not far from Atlantic City. The residents were, she found, “the strangest combination of grownup and child”—as she herself was often said to be. “Some of the ladies are my age and they look like they are 12,” she reported to her daughter Amy. And yet, for once, the images do not feel steeped in Arbus’s presence, or in the tidal pull of her needs. The women exist in and unto themselves, and the images, frequently misted with blurs, are more tender than anything Arbus had done before—“finally what I’ve been searching for,” she wrote to her ex-husband, Allan. Imprecision, like mercy, did not make them less true. Many of the subjects were photographed at play, masked for Halloween, and Arbus did not hesitate to register their joy. Others, she saw, were more wretched, and one of them was heard to say, over and over, “Was I the only one born?” ♦

*An earlier version misstated the Guggenheim foundation from which Arbus won a grant in 1963.

Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”